Product release notes
This is a running list of the releases that Formant has built and deployed. The dates represent when the release was deployed to production and made available to users.
Oct 8 v 1.7 (Web & Agent release)
General improvements & bug fixes to web application
- General bug fixes for web application
Oct 3 v 1.5 (Web & Agent release)
General improvements & bug fixes to web application
- General bug fixes for web application
- Support for alerts on the new battery type
- Display device name on Slack alerts
- Several new hotkeys available for common tasks
- Shift-J for Jump-To device or channels
- Shift-A for adding annotation
- Shift-D for configuring device
- Shift C for adding a comment
- Shift R for retrieving on-demand data
- Shift I for issuing command
- Shift-X for creating a capture session
- Shift-S for sharing data
- Shift-E for exporting data
-
New annotation sidebar window that allows users to annotate while viewing data
- Control the timeline scrubber while annotating
- Three options to save
- Added support to create service accounts using fctl

Sep 25 v 1.4 (Web & Agent release)
General improvements & bug fixes to web application
- General bug fixes for web application
- Support for service accounts
- Annotations open up in the sidebar, thereby allowing operators to annotate while viewing data
Sep 17 v 1.3 (Web & Agent release)
General improvements & bug fixes to web application
- General bug fixes for web application
- Updated Terms of Service
Sep 10 v 1.2 (Web & Agent release)
General improvements & bug fixes to web application
- General bug fixes for web application
- Enable publishing of annotations to Google Sheets directly
Sep 3 v 1.1 (Web & Agent release)
General improvements & bug fixes to web application
- General bug fixes for web application
Older releases
Aug 27 v 1.0 (Web & Agent release)
Annotate or label robot data (BETA)
- Annotate or label your robot's data within Formant
- Export the annotations to a Google Sheet for further downstream analysis
- Gain insights on your robot's activities or performance through this
- Read more about annotations here
Ingest video telemetry
- Ingest H264 encoded video data into the Cloud
General improvements & bug fixes
- General bug fixes for web application
Aug 20 v 0.86 (Web & Agent release)
Retrieve data On-demand from robot (BETA)
- Store robot telemetry data on the device itself so it can be accessed when needed or kept until extraction.
- Reduce the costs of mobile data transfer, cloud storage, and processing.
- Read more about enabling on-demand data
Aug 13 v 0.85 (Web & Agent release)
General improvements & bug fixes
- Select a module to see its data presence on Timeline - Select a module by clicking on its header and see the data availability of that module on the timeline.
- Select a module to see its menu - Select a module by clicking on its header and see its more menu
Aug 6 v 0.84 (Web & Agent release)
General improvements & bug fixes to web application
- General bug fixes for web application
July 31 v 0.83 (Web & Agent release)
General improvements & bug fixes
- New meatball menu - This helps organize and display the set of tools and utilities (Capture, Share, Comment, Commands etc.) available on a Channel
- Several bug fixes and improvements to the agent and web application
July 23 v 0.82 (Web & Agent release)
General improvements & bug fixes to web application (v0.82)
- New battery module visualization
- Create Share links that do not expire. This is useful in scenarios where the link is expected to be used in public articles or blogs or even on a dashboard.
- Improvements to filter on the events page to include warnings and errors
- Add agent client to formant pip module
Teleoperation Updates
- Major improvements to teleoperation
- Visualize battery state on teleoperation status bar
- Doubleclick to fullscreen for teleop sidebar modules
July 16 v 0.81 (Web & Agent release)
General improvements & bug fixes to web application (v0.81)
- Set UTC time from the Timeline. The default timezone used in Formant is the local time of the computer. While debugging a robot, it is sometimes helpful to be in the same timezone as the robot. Set the timezone to UTC from the timeline. Note that this will impact timezone across your user profile within Formant.
- Adds tags when commenting.
- Fix visualization of fast-changing bitset values
- Searching for command names in event history does not return command events
- Make it possible to link directly to fullscreen modules
- List events from using
fctl list events
- Temporary moving & resizing should only be initiated from the stream name target
July 9 v 0.80 (Web & Agent release)
General improvements & bug fixes to web application (v0.80)
- General bug fixes for web application
July 2 v 0.79 (Web & Agent release)
General improvements & bug fixes to web application (v0.79)
- Add the ability to reprovision a robot from the device list page
- Save orientation of Localization/TF/Pointcloud within Views
- Teleoperation of ROS based robots are configured automatically
- Add webhook docs
- Allow users (operators/viewers) to change module size temporarily instead of having to edit a layout
- Move help link to near Formant logo so it is more visible
- Events will extend the time a configuration is applied if the same event is triggered.
Agent update (v0.79)
- General bug fixes
June 25 v 0.77 (Web release)
General improvements & bug fixes to web application (v0.77)
- Set base transform for transform/tf tree
- Optimize telemetry stream ingestion when teleoperation session is active
- Add support for configuring multiple ROS topics as a single stream from the UI
- Support seconds option in the timeline
- Improvements to bitset visualization
- Autoconfigure ROS topics when agents install on ROS based robots
- Allow users to clear commands queue
June 11 v 0.75 (Web & agent release)
General improvements & bug fixes to web application (v0.75)
- Rename stream throttle field to rate limit in the configuration
- Improvements and bug fixes to commands and events
- Respect cmd/ctrl + click for links (open in new tab)
- Improvements and bug fixes to Formant on iPad/Safari
Agent update (v0.75)
- General bug fixes
June 4 (Web & Agent release)
General improvements & bug fixes to web application (v0.74)
- Support for over-the-air (OTA) update of Formant agent (requires agent version 0.73.72)
- Configurable Capture expiration
- Bug fixes to support Safari and iPad
- Add filter and stats header to Settings page
- Minor bug fixes, and improvements to web application
- Change docs URL to help.formant.io
Teleoperation updates
- Availability of teleoperation using H264 encoding (requires agent version 0.73.72)
- Alert user of connection quality on teleop
- Minor bug fixes to teleoperation interface
Agent update (v0.73.72)
- Availability of teleoperation using H264 encoding
- Support for over-the-air (OTA) update
- SSH to your robot
May 28 v0.72 (Web release)
General improvements & bug fixes to web application
- Minor bug fixes, and improvements to web application
May 21 v0.71 (Web release)
General improvements & bug fixes to web application
- Offline data ingestion using fctl ingest
- Improvements to Settings page UI/UX
- Convert device configuration to a template
- Enable clone of configuration templates
May 14 v0.70 (Web release)
General improvements & bug fixes to web application
- Added formant tools under Utilities tab of web application
- Moved app config to General configuration menu
May 7 v0.69 (Web release)
General improvements & bug fixes to web application
- Minor bug fixes to web application
- Improvements to the events page
April 30 (Web release)
Improvements & bug fixes to web application
- Device Layouts renamed to Views
- New, improved View creation flow
- The ability to filter on the Events page introduced
- Improved query performance
- Ability to choose between satellite map and street map
- Comments are represented as diamond icons
- Cancel comments by pressing escape
- Several minor fixes in channels, settings
- Add built-in command descriptions
- Added icons to admin page
- Allow members/operators to configure time on a per-module level
April 23 (Web & Agent release)
Improvements & bug fixes to web application
Enable per-stream throttle configuration(requires agent version > 0.68)
- Allow administrators to configure per-stream throttle value
- Improved display of IFM sensor media data
Agent improvements (v0.68.65)
- Enable per stream throttle
April 16 (Web & Agent release)
Improvements & bug fixes to web application
- Provide Operators with the following capabilities, in addition to all existing Member capabilities
- Create capture links
- Run commands from device channel
- Create share links from regular and device channels
- Enhance built-in command to publish strings to any ROS topic
- Display 0.5 playback speed
- Support multi-line comments
- Use snackbar for status information
- Minor configuration style fixes
- Fix pointcloud display
- Hide "all" split by option for single tag key
- Fix high latency during playback
- Fix command template validation for built-in commands
Major redesign of filters
- Display all filters, including user-defined tags at the same level
- Add "none" tag filter option
- Reduce filter latency
- Fix edit device view tags handling
Agent improvements (v0.66.63)
- Add support for configurable topic name to publish ROS topic command feature/custom stream config 2
- Fix/agent config stream validation
April 9 (Web & Agent release)
Improvements & bug fixes to web application
- Enable search by user name or email on the events page
- Add capability to split a numeric graph based on tags
- Add userId to command request for user-initiated commands
- Enable basic sort on events page
- Remove the capability to run commands for Members
- Include command parameter in message
- Fix minor bug in comment deletion
Agent updates
- Fix minor bug in getFile (built-in) command
April 6 (Web release)
- Display command parameters on the events page or when hovering over a command based event
- Display timeline when the module is in full-screen mode
April 3 (Web release)
Improvements to channels & layouts
- Improve color consistency on graphs
- Fix empty space on layouts with no matching modules. This will show modules instead of showing empty space
- Adjust image autofill logic
- Move "hide" (X) functionality to module menu to reduce confusion while building layouts
- Reorder layouts using up and down arrows on Settings -> Device Layouts
Improvement to events of interest
- Enable/disable alerts for an event
- Apply commands as part of an event trigger
- Allow event triggers on bitset data type
Bugs & general improvements
- Fixed the issue where Google chrome tab name does not reflect device name
- Fixed the issue where unavailable modules leave large space on channels
- Fixed minor bugs on the comments feature
- Fixed wording on invitation emails
- Performance improvements on the web application
March 30 (Web & Agent release)
- Allow user to add Comment on timeline and modules
- Show all events, instead of unread events, by default on the Event list page
- Adjust module padding to ensure title is for the bottom module
- Display online devices at the top of the sidebar devices list
- Show only alert count, instead of event counts, in events button
- Added organization name to sidebar
- Added help tooltips to Settings pages
Agent & fctl updates (v0.64.75)
- fctl list device without agent name
- Move installation location from /etc/formant to /usr/lib/formant
- Use bash instead of sh for formant-agent startup script